Space, Time and Gender in the Film D'art Carmen of 1910 Nicholas Till

Space, Time and Gender in the Film d’Art Carmen of 1910

Nicholas Till

The Film d'Art Carmen of 1910 was one of a number of films in which the Film d'Art company sought to give cultural status to the new medium of film through the high-art connotations of opera, effecting a natural transference of the melodramatic stage-style of opera to the newly evolving dramatic language of silent film. As in most Film d'Art productions, the company employed already acknowledged stage performers, including a well-known contemporary performer of the role of Carmen from the Opéra Comique, and sets copied from the original 1875 staging of Bizet's opera. The essential paradox of silent-movie opera is here rendered especially pointed by the fact that Carmen is figured as ‘singer’ in Bizet's opera. However, as popular singer Carmen represents cultural energies that must be suppressed. The silent movie assures these ends, depriving Carmen even of her voice. Her muteness is compensated by an extreme physicality that fights to assert itself against the tightly constrained stage-set spaces of the film. This paper will offer a reading of the Film d'Art Carmen's physicality as a transgression of accepted gender roles that thematizes social concerns about the challenge to conventional ideas of masculine and feminine space in early modernity. The paper will also offer an analysis of the narrative construction and mise en scène of the Film d'Art Carmen in the context of the deployment of space and time in related pre-1910 films, examining this issue in relation to the gendering of space and time in traditional art forms. The paper will argue that the character of Carmen in the Film d'Art film figures the problematic spatialization (and hence feminization) of narrative action in early film, suggesting that the destruction of Carmen prefigures the eventual triumph of the ‘masculine’ principle of narrative action over ‘feminine’ spatial inertia in what film historians describe as the ‘institutional mode of representation’.

Film d’Art: Carmen Filmic space Gender and space Institutional Mode of Representation Primitive Mode of Representation Silent Film

This essay was first presented as an accompaniment to a showing of the sixteen-minute Film d’Art Carmen of 1910. Silent movies were, of course, never silent, and in delivering the paper in this fashion, which allowed the audience to see for themselves the points I was making as the film unfolded, I made appeal to the practice of the silent movie lecturer, whose ubiquity is much disputed, but whose employment was certainly encouraged by a critic in 1911: ‘If you have seen a picture ten times you can be of great help to the man who sees it for 10 Nicholas Till the first time. You can explain and point out things that at first exhibition of the release even a man of average intelligence and good education might very easily miss’ (Burch 1990: 133). Although for copyright reasons the opening title declares that the film is based upon Mérimée’s novella, the narrative presentation of the Film d’Art version of Carmen in fact relies upon the dramatic structure of Bizet’s opera, except that the dramatically redundant character of Micaela is excised. Indeed, the film’s general intention to refer to the opera rather than the novel is clear: the film sets are derived from stage productions of the opera (Susan McClary identifies the sets for the final scene as being copied from the original 1870 stage production),1 and the performer of the role of Carmen is identified as ‘Mlle Regine Badet of the Opéra Comique’, a seasoned performer of the role of Carmen. These references to the opera are an important indicator of the aspirations of the Film d’Art Carmen. The first context for the showing of films had been the variety halls, peep-show arcades and fairs associated with working class leisure: by 1905, the art historian Erwin Panofsky recalled, there were in Berlin still only ‘a few small and dingy cinemas mostly frequented by the “lower classes”’ (Panofsky 1985: 216). But film historians note that around the years 1909 and 1910, after the economic recession of 1907, the emergent film industries in Europe and the USA began to pitch for more affluent, middle-class audiences. In the USA the Biograph company, with Griffiths as its star director, started to produce moralizing films with increasingly sophisticated narrative structures. In France the Film d’Art company, whose name itself indicates its pretensions, was set up in 1908 as a subsidiary of Pathé to make films based on classical theatre and opera, advertising them quite shamelessly as being for ‘the higher class of audience’ (Abel 1994: 261). One of their first, and best-known, efforts was L’assassinat du duc de Guise (1908), noted for its score by France’s most eminent composer Saint-Saens. The Carmen of 1910 was one of a number of opera films, which included Tosca (1909), another drama about a female singer. This turn to opera came about primarily as a result of opera’s high art connotations: Carmen, dressed up with recitatives, had by now migrated securely from its ambiguous status as opéra comique to that of full-blown grand opera. But it was perhaps also because opera relied upon a broadly melodramatic performance style that could be transferred with relative ease to the emergent dramatic language of silent film. Indeed, Noël Burch suggests that silent film should be seen